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The most important reason

for shooting in raw is that it when you edit a raw file it does no damage. First do no harm. A raw image is not really an image at all; it is a data set, a collection of zeroes and ones, produced when light falls on your digital camera’s sensor. In order to produce an understandable image that we can view on a computer screen, this data set must be converted from sensor data into traditional RGB values. The RGB data can then be saved in a format we are familiar with, like JPEG, TIFF, or PSD. When you set your camera to shoot in JPEG mode, you are essentially telling your camera to “process” the raw data
into RGB data, and then save it in JPEG format.

The implications of shooting in raw can have significant effects on the image quality. In JPEG mode, the camera essentially becomes your photo laboratory. All the camera applies settings to your image including; contrast, color, white balance and sharpening. Once the JPEG is encoded, all of those attributes are firmly embedded as RGB image information. In other words, with JPEG there is very little latitude for making changes to the core parameters of your image, like exposure. If your exposure settings are off, or you used the wrong white balance, those errors will be applied to the RGB image and “baked in”. Once it is in JPEG format it already has lost some of the information. Note that everytime you save the JPEG it loses information. Correcting these images can become a serious challenge, depending on the severity of the adjustment needed. Anyone who is familiar with making flatbed scans of their snapshots will understand that the quality of their digital image was absolutely limited by the quality of the original print.

With raw, this is not the case. The mere fact that the image data have not been converted to RGB means that you can reinterpret those little ones and zeros all you want after you have taken the image. There is no color, contrast, or sharpness information in the raw file. Those attributes are applied only after the image is converted to an RGB bitmap file. Unlike bitmap images, when you modify a raw file
you are not changing the underlying data, you are simply reinterpreting it. In this way, raw editing offers a “nondestructive” workflow. Change the contrast or color balance in a JPEG, and there is no going back. If you should accidentally make changes to a JPEG or TIFF without saving a copy of the original, it will be very hard to recover the original image attributes. A raw file, on the other hand, can be processed and reprocessed, and each time the output will show no loss of image quality because the underlying data are always preserved.